Sunday, 20 October 2013

Is mainframe worth the money ?

I am not even a beginner on mainframe. But recent announcement by the big blue (IBM) attracted my attention. Mainframe is not a great performance machine. Since a super computer out performs a mainframe in terms of computing powers. Mainframe seems to do well in high transaction processing. But i see that regular server grade Xeon based pc provides good performance for the money. While a regular mainframe costs 62 lacs INR (100K USD), a mid level xeon server can be bought at fraction of that price. If the redundancy and performance are its usp, then we can achieve the same via stacking together couple of more servers and still have huge savings. Further even if mainframe makes sense then hiring mainframe administrators may be costly affair. I do see that you would typically require minuscule number of administrators. So i am wondering is mainframe worth the money ? Is it still relevant in these days of cloud computing and virtualisation crazy.